Boys Will Be Curious

Boys Will Be Boys Gross Curious

 My sweet son, G, has serious ear issues. The very first time we were aware of his "issues" was when he woke up with brown-tinted ooze coming out of his ear. He was nearly one year old and never had a fever, pulled at his ears, or had any other indicator of an ear infection. Mother's Day 2010, I was paged away from church to take care of my baby, who had a 102 temp. It was his ears. Again. He was on some kind of antibiotic for more than six weeks. I preferred tubes, but the ENT was a little more conservative and he wanted to wait it out. When G's ear drum perforated while on strong antibiotics, we scheduled surgery. All went well and he had no infections for three years...

 Then, this past February, he woke up once again with a soaking wet, nasty pillow case and fluid draining from his ear. I actually first noticed something was not right because he was covered in hives (another post in itself). A ten day course of antibiotics and he was good to go...for about a month. Then it happened again. (This child has an incredible tolerance for pain- they should do some research on him). Back to the ENT we went.
 

 This time around, the ENT doc. suggested his adenoids come out. I was expecting that. The main warning from the doctor was this: "his breath will be really bad." "Okay," I replied. "No, I mean, really bad. It's bad. Horrible." The doctor was serious about this bad breath warning. We scheduled the surgery.
 

 When the day came for my nearly four year old to have surgery, I was nervous. My brain, being saturated with statistics (most of which I make up), knew the chances of something going wrong were tiny. But my doubting, faith-lacking part of the brain wouldn't shut up. So I went to the surgery center armed.   

 We waited and waited and waited. We waited so long that I started to do squats in the pre-op area. We may have even spent some time speaking with accents or sticking surgery bear's head out of the curtain as nurses were walking by. (We now have two surgery bears. G wants more. I do not.)Then they took him back and we waited some more.

 

 

 They brought G out from recovery and I was positive they had switched him with a look-a-like demon child. He was screaming, crying, sometimes flopping around like a fish. When we asked him what was wrong he mostly said "I DON'T KNOW!" And the breath. Oh my, there is a reason the doctor warned us multiple times about that. Burnt flesh. That's all I will say. When we got home, he was peacefully sleeping and loudly snoring. He recovered very quickly and was off to school after a day.

 

 We informed the teachers of his procedure and I wrote a note explaining the death breath. Five days after his surgery, the school called me. I didn't get to the phone in time. Then my husband called: "We need to go get G from school." My mind ran away with itself. Does he have a fever? An infection? Is he bleeding? Will he need an emergency surgery?! No, none of those. It was this:

 

 If you are having trouble seeing that, it says "bead." G stuck a bead up his nose. It turned out that we didn't have to pick him up at school because he was able to huff and puff and blow the bead out. The paramedics then gave him a stuffed bear for being so brave (just what we needed). G proceeded to tell his friends that "if you put a bead in your nose, you will get a bear!" I, personally, think this bear was a punishment for his behavior. We lovingly refer to him as "scary beary."